An inquiry into the origin of the antiquities of America / By John Delafield, Jr. With an appendix, containing notes, and 'A view of the causes of the superiority of the men of the Northern over those of the Southern Hemisphere', by James Lakey.
- John Delafield
- Date:
- 1839
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: An inquiry into the origin of the antiquities of America / By John Delafield, Jr. With an appendix, containing notes, and 'A view of the causes of the superiority of the men of the Northern over those of the Southern Hemisphere', by James Lakey. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![off all their clothes, (their usual custom,) previous to lying down to sleep in the open air; their bodies doubled around a few burning reeds. We could not understand how they bore the cold thus naked, when the earth was white with hoar frost; and they were equally at a loss to know how we could sleep in our tents without having a bit of fire beside us to keep our bodies warm. For the support of animal heat, fire and smoke are almost as necessary to them as clothes are to us, and the naked savage is not without some reason on his side, for with fire to warm his body, he has all the comfort he ever knows; whereas we require both fire and clothing, and can therefore have no conception of the intensity of enjoyment imparted to the naked body of a savage by the glowing embrace of a cloud of smoke in winter, — or in summer the luxury of a bath which he may enjoy in any pond, when not content with the refreshing breeze that fans his body during the intense heat. — From the Review of Major Mitchell’s Australian Expedition. (8.) The Ancient Feruvians. — Those aboriginal tribes, up to the time of the Incas, were in the lowest state of savage degradation. Their dwelling places were holes and caves in the mountains. Their food was not the product of the soil, but, excepting human flesh, the game of the woods, the fish of their streams, and the wild roots, fruits and berries of the forest. Those who were not in a state of entire nudity, covered themselves with the undressed skins of the beasts they caught. But the most horrifying feature in their savage character teas their cannibalism. They did not content themselves with imitating the Mexicans, who feasted on the human flesh offered to their gods, or other tribes who made their prisoners of war the meat of their table; but they fed and fattened their' own children, that they might butcher them like swine, and feed on their bloody corpses. But no sooner had the Incarial family entered Peru, and acquired authority, than these shocking atrocities vanished from the country. — Rev. J. Dempster’s Letter from Buenos Ayres, dated Jan. 1838. (9.) Sir David Brewster called attention to the important fact, clearly established by the meteorological observations recorded in the neighborhood of New-York, and those of Harsteen and Erman in Siberia, that two points of maximum cold existed in those regions, very generally agreeing in the position with the centres of maximum magnetic intensities, and like them, too, the maximum of North America indicated a decidedly higher degree of cold than that which characterised the Siberian pole. Also, that the lines of equally mean temperature, as they surrounded these poles, had such a relation to the lines of equal magnetic intensity, as to point out clearly some yet unknown connexion between these two classes of phenomena. ************ * # * * * As to the connexion between animal and vegetable life and climate, something more would be found necessary than mere mean temperature. He had often ridden violently, and used much bodily exei’tion in New South Wales, with the thermometer at 110 degrees in the shade, when the same temperature in England would be insupportable, [the same heat never occurs in England with the mercury in the shade.] And in the East Indies all the Europeans were so enervated when the thermometer stood at this height [110 degrees] as to be nearly incapable of active exertion. As to vegetation, we had on the one side of the Himalayan range, at an elevation of little](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b30455662_0182.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
